Bethany Yarrow finds her voice

SCHENECTADY -- As the daughter of folk icon Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary, Bethany Yarrow was not at all sure she wanted to follow in daddy's footsteps.

"(Punk) was just music that spoke to me at 15 years old more than 'If I Had a Hammer,' " the now 41-year-old singer said.

The Bethany & Rufus Roots Quartet will headline a show Saturday night at the Eighth Step at Proctors Theatre.

As a child, Nicaragua was Yarrow's summer camp and activism was the watch word, but as she got older, the folk scene of her father's generation seemed archaic.

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But then, in her 20s, she became a music teacher.

"I didn't really know what music to sing to (students). I mean, it was really inappropriate to sing them the ironic, sexy rock songs that I was writing at the time. So, I just said, 'What do I actually have to teach kids that they might not know?' We started to play these old folk songs."

The older she got, the more she appreciated her dad's music -- how it fit into history, and the importance of the artists who were rubbing shoulders with the most successful act of folk's first era.

"(Odetta was) very profound, almost like a prayer, and a prayer can take on a lot of different forms," Yarrow said. "You can hold hands around the dinner table. You can get on your knees and weep. You can dance and you can sing many different ways. You can walk in the forest, but there's a mediumistic sense where, especially in these songs, you're really channeling the past and your ancestors and a collected history. And, in order to do that authentically, you have to be who you are now, in the present. Otherwise, you're just kind of an actor on stage, acting out the past.

"For me, the point isn't to go back to the past and try and recreate it. It's really trying to learn from all the people who came before and assimilate that into yourself and then be able to re-express that so people can understand where they are in the arc of history and the trajectory of those songs and to make these songs living entities again, not just a tribute or a nod of the hat or a stylistic act," she said. "You're certainly taking on the message of this music and you're a transmitter in a certain way. You really feel like you're in the middle of something, a historical reality much larger than yourself."

Yarrow's partner, Rufus Cappadocia, is a world-renowned cellist who designs his own instruments and has performed with artists as varied as Aretha Franklin, Odetta and Vernon Reid of Living Colour.

He is in awe of Bethany and recalls a comment Franklin made when she heard Bethany sing "Hushaby." The soul singer didn't think a white person could do the song justice until she heard Bethany's version.

Their quartet includes Donga Jena Baptiste, a master Haitian drummer, and Brahim Fribgane, a Moroccan on oud and cajon. The concert is dedicated to Black History Month.

"Truly, every time we play we're honoring black history," Cappadocia said. "Bethany grew up singing the songs she inherited from her dad, and she always gravitated toward the spiritual and freedom songs, and that's what we've been working with, especially the blues material and gospel material from that."

Yarrow sees folk music through a modern lens in a world where virtual reality and technology sometimes water down the message, but she's applying some lessons from her dad.

"You're able to step into the footsteps your parents have made possible for you," she said. "You remake it yourself, parts of it, and you just are able to say, 'Oh, that's what they were talking about.' You're finally old enough to get it in some way."

The show will also feature Afro-Caribbean dancers and IMOJA Hamilton Hill Arts Center dancers and drummers.